Statistical mechanics of horizontal gene transfer in evolutionary ecology

DOI10.1007/S10955-010-0112-8MaRDI QIDQ540556zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Nigel Goldenfeld, Nicholas J. Y. Chia

Publication date 3 June 2011

Published in Journal of Statistical Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1012.2166

zbMATH Keywords

evolutionmobile genetic elementshorizontal gene transfermetagenomics

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Genetics and epigenetics (92D10) Population dynamics (general) (92D25) Applications of statistical mechanics to specific types of physical systems (82D99)

Abstract: The biological world, especially its majority microbial component, is strongly interacting and may be dominated by collective effects. In this review, we provide a brief introduction for statistical physicists of the way in which living cells communicate genetically through transferred genes, as well as the ways in which they can reorganize their genomes in response to environmental pressure. We discuss how genome evolution can be thought of as related to the physical phenomenon of annealing, and describe the sense in which genomes can be said to exhibit an analogue of information entropy. As a direct application of these ideas, we analyze the variation with ocean depth of transposons in marine microbial genomes, predicting trends that are consistent with recent observations using metagenomic surveys.

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Cites work

• Dangerous nutrients: evolution of phytoplankton resource uptake subject to virus attack
• Dynamical behaviour of biological regulatory networks. I: Biological role of feedback loops and practical use of the concept of the loop- characteristic state
• Modeling the role of viral disease in recurrent phytoplankton blooms
• Statistical mechanics unifies different ecological patterns
• Synchronization of Pulse-Coupled Biological Oscillators

Cited in

(3)

• Current views of evolution: on the role of horizontal gene transfer
• Statistical mechanics ideas and techniques applied to selected problems in ecology
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 3904390 (Why is no real title available?)

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